MUMMY NEEDS A BREAK
Susan Edmunds
Published by AVON
A division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2019
Copyright © Susan Edmunds 2019
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Cover illustration © Sara Gerard
Susan Edmunds asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008316099
Ebook Edition © July 2019 ISBN: 9780008316082
Version: 2019-06-15
To my husband, Jeremy
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Acknowledgements
About the Author
About the Publisher
How to make blue playdough
What you’ll need*:
1 cup water
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
½ cup salt
1 tablespoon cream of tartar
Blue food colouring
1 cup flour
*A sharp eye to catch bits before they’re ground into the carpet
Combine water, oil, salt, cream of tartar, and food colouring in a saucepan and heat until warm. Remove from heat and add flour. Stir and knead like it’s your husband’s head, and he’s just informed you he’s working through the children’s bath time, again. Warning: The kids will eat more playdough than you realise. It will turn everything in their digestive systems a deep shade of yellow. Apt really, when you’re discovering what a coward the man you married has become.
It was a particularly muggy spring evening when my usually uneventful, comfortably boringly suburban life fell apart. I was eight months pregnant, sweaty, grumpy and was working late. Again.
‘So, tell me a bit about what’s happened.’ I had tucked my phone into the crook of my neck, a pen making an indent in my middle finger as I scribbled on my notepad. Somewhere beyond the door to my makeshift home office in our spare bedroom, I could hear my two-and-a-half-year-old son, Thomas, pushing a toy truck or car repeatedly into the freshly painted wall of the kitchen. At least, I hoped it was a car. The way our day was going, it might have been his father’s head.
The woman at the other end of the phone coughed. Could she hear me tapping my pen on my notebook? I eyed the clock: 6.30. My workday was meant to finish at 5 p.m., but the emails from my editor had become increasingly frantic. If we didn’t want yet another front-page story about the unseasonable weather, I needed to get a quote from this woman about her burgled-for-the-fourth-time-in-a-month clothes store.
‘I don’t want to make myself more of a target …’ I could hear her jangling a bunch of keys.
I deployed the most soothing tone I could muster. She sounded about the same age as my mother, but the photos I’d found of her in our files looked as if she was only a decade or so older than me. ‘I’m sure you won’t. You must want something done to improve safety?’
I bit my lip,
